mSpot becomes first cloud music service with streaming radio

Cloud music service mSpot announced Radio Spotter beta Thursday morning. Radio Spotter is a streaming radio service that uses your mSpot music collection to generate radio station recommendations for you automatically.

You can also listen to hundreds of radio stations based on your own searches. The Radio Spotter service works by peeking into the metadata of your songs and churning out recommended radio stations for you to listen to. This makes mSpot the first cloud music service that also has a radio feature built in.

The Radio Spotter service is launching in the mSpot Music Android app and rolling out to other devices like the iPhone later this year. I’ve had a chance to play around with the Android app, uploading a chunk of my music collection, playing it from the cloud and seeing what kind of radio stations it pops out for me to listen to.

The mSpot app played back the music I had synced with the service nicely, with very decent sound quality even on the ‘space saving’ mobile setting. It automatically caches songs to your device as you play them so that songs you commonly play will be available instantly even without a connection.

The streaming began almost immediately for any songs I played including ones that were streaming from the cloud or those that were cached to the device. Album art and free lyrics are included as well.

The Radio Spotter service is built right into the menu, with a dedicated tab to see your suggested stations or a list of genres to browse through if you’d rather hunt and peck. In addition, there’s a slick Radio button available right in the player. If you’re listening to a song, just tap the button and you’ll be presented with a selection of stations that just played that artist or other similar artists.

The suggested stations populated after only a few spins of my own tracks and seemed pretty accurate. I played some Jeremih and some Katy Perry and it spilled out a list of channels with titles like ‘Top 20’, ‘Dance Hits’ and 2010 Grammy Nominees.’ If you prefer to curate your own, there’s also the option to create your own personal stations based on searches or your own music.

The addition of a streaming radio service to a cloud music service seems like a complete no-brainer. mSpot got there first and did a really solid job of it, but it’s such a good idea that I think we can expect Google, Apple and Amazon to all start offering something similar sooner rather than later. Hopefully the head start will give mSpot the juice it needs to stay ahead of the pack.

You can grab Radio Spotter Beta on the Android marketplace today and listen to radio without signing in or you can sign up for the cloud music service, with 5GB of free storage at mSpot.com.